Following below, courtesy of Kent Johnson, is one of the twenty letters from _Also, with My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada's Letters in English_, by Tosa Motokiyu, edited by Kent Johnson and Javier Alvarez, forthcoming in fall, 2004 from Combo Books.

There are some interesting correspondences between the Yasusada letter and the poem/post(s) here on naming (Tues Sep 14, with poetry from New American Writing, poem post, "Chestnuts," from Ko Un, contemporary Korean poet; and Sat Sep 4, cf to kari edwards poem and one of mine that date on As/Is: scroll down to see the posts), as Kent Johnson wrote me to point out. The correspondences are uncanny--there are similarities between the opening of the Yasusada letter and the opening of the "Chestnuts" poem by the Korean poet Ko Un, and come down to an interrelation over "naming" that is a crosscultural semiosis in terms of the figure of the nut and its symbolics-- a similarity that goes right down to the "sound-effect" of the seed popping out, so is more than delightfully strange as/in poetry having unpredicable correspondences (also something of a resonant term in itself, given what has been made of its use in Baudelaire by the modernists Pound and Eliot). Anyway, it's good to see how the phenomenon of naming, although limited--as Ko Un indicates in writing "Nothing in this world can really be named./ Names are spoken so rashly./"--is also full of surprises, right down to the semiosis of phonememes it yields, such as the Pop! shared by both the Yasusada and the Ko Un pieces.

So do check this out, and compare it to the Ko Un poem posted below:

* * *
October 19, 1926

Dear Richard:

Fundamentally, this nowness of mind is the skin of the outer
hardening. A little seed inside swells to an amazing largeness. KO
POP! [sic] as we say in my nation: "When the fruit splits open an
infinitness spills out."

Please accept my deepest pleasantries [sic]1 regarding the accidental
death of your brother in the event of crossing the sea.2 I would drink
every bone in your weeping if it was a possibleness for me.

It is natural, like sky, to be sad.

Shinto priests have rhymy [sic] or pointy hats which prick the clouds.
From your eyes, it rains from holes of clouds which are forms inside
this skin of my thinking circling you.

There is only this wetted pastness that pours for always out of this
presentness:

Now turn your rainy face towards me.

Bring the vase of your heart into me.

Everywhere, the thought of him you seek will sleep in me like a seed
inside the mouth of you.

(But I am not sure how to say these numerous sayings in your tongue.)

That is one reason my rickety language is the hut where I am swelled
with you.